Even the anarchist cookbook wasn’t this evil
Fuck you dudes get a bike. Or Uber when traveling.
And stop using x.
And while I have your attention, dont forget to brush and floss tonight.
It’s time to stop subsidizing parking spaces. Their land use is actually really expensive and that burden should be on those using the land for storing tons of metal, not cross-financed by those choosing more sustainable means of transport.
God forbid you pay for the things you use. 🙄
It depends on the hotel but one strategy I’ve found is to tell them you didn’t drive or aren’t parked there as a bold face lie. They can barely pay staff to clean the rooms and they don’t patrol the parking lot. If they erroneously tow a guest or employee who forgot their permit or mid-remembered their license plate that would be really bad for them - it’s not worth the risk.
Yeah no. Im a subject matter expert on parking. If the demand for their parking is so high that they are charging, then they very likely have a parkinf enforcement plan.
In the marekt…he who who makes money off an asset, protects said asset.
You speak as one unlearned in parking asset management.
That’s a great way to get your car towed.
They just have a company like inpark run their lot, they don’t need to do or pay shit. The company tows and charges all on its own.
The hotel’s owner won’t get hurt, but the poor housekeepers definitely will.
Owners will eventually be hurt; they care about profit and profit alone. Any superfluous costs will eat into the profit. This method would generate extra work - costing money, which would fail to resolve the issue repeatedly - costing money, until finally a replacement is ordered - costing money, then the maintenance guy has to ignore whatever other task and install the new furniture - costing money.
If only 10% of hotel guests did this at just half the rooms they stayed in over a year we’d collapse the global tourism economy and permanently shut down most hotels across the world.
The root problem here is car dependency.
Capitalism creates helplessness in order to exploit it.
All sorts of comments here are missing the real problem: businesses had a chance to do online meetings. But they dont. So they send people everywhere, staying in hotels, driving up the costs, charging them for parking because they can.
The fallout is everyone pays more. It isn’t just people on vacation paying for this.
Yep, my job just got done with another round of layoffs for “cost cutting”. But you better believe we still have those twice yearly off sites where they fly a few hundred people all over the globe over the course of a year to “get face time”.
Only fans doesn’t substitute for sex work.
If you dont believe me, ask your mom.
Becauae she’s a lovely woman who wouldnt lie to her favorite, beloved son.
Unless she getting paid, then she pulling them dentures out and sucking ass like a snake bit it.
Just kidding!
…That’s really more your dads thing…
online meetings suck. especially if they are larger than 6-12 people.
face to face meetings are superior to every way. they provide opportunity for networking and are more productive.
there is a reason we are going back to in-person events. they are simple superior in terms of outcomes and opportunities.
what a bold statement
face to face meeting absolutely fucking suck for technical presentations where multiple people are sharing designs and looking at spec sheets etc.
face to face meetings are superior to every way.
No they are not. If they are for you, you are doing them wrong. They are huge time wasters, and energy wasters.
Face to Face with family? Fine. With work? A jerk off session to spend money on travel. So much wasted time.
The worst offender though? Hybrid. They suck the most of all.
Right, let me go tell the network of expert medical researchers I work with how ‘stupid and dumb’ they are for wanting face to face meetings.
those ignorant fools, clearly YOU, some random bozo on the internet, know better than they do how best to collaborate on their work.
no, you tell them that
I’m an expert in my field. I say online meetings are better
Oooh, an appeal to authority! You have experts on your side!? How can the poor internet people even hope to compete with such intellectual prowess?? You don’t even need to state why those experts believe that to convince everyone else!
it’s so funny how many lemmy experts know nothing about how the real world works.
i suppose you think we should just get rid of in person learning too right? just stick kids in front of computer screens at home! it will totalyl work so well!
oh wait… we did that, and it did tons of damage to those kids…
You’re right, those poor expert medical researchers won’t learn how to socialize without in person conferences giving them exposure to other people!
What other plans do I have that will backfire in the most horrible ways??
Expert medical researchers, they need face time to do what exactly? I call bullshit. Of course they want face time. Per diem, a hotel stay, frequent flyer miles, all the perks.
BULLSHIT they cant do their work without. And if they can’t they really do not know how to do their job.
you call bullshit because you don’t do collaborative work that is spread out across multiple sites.
nor do you understand how much is lost by zooming and how limited it’s functionality and productivity is.
collaborative work spread across multiple sites is exactly why online meetings are so much more effective in my industry
collaborative work that is spread out across multiple sites.
Yeah. I do.
to share their results and collaborate and figure out new possibilities for research by reviewing each other’s work and talking about it.
So they are reading each others work, reviewing it and talking about it.
And this has to be in person how? And how much more work would be done if it was asynchronous?
You know how many scientists in various fields work remotely?
There are fields where work has to take place where you are, for example you can’t do archaeology from afar. But you can meet with archaeologists all over the world to discuss findings. And a huge portion of that work is done by reading the papers. So most of the collaboration is clarification and questioning anyways.
No. they discuss it. in a group. person to person. with other researchers from across the country and practitioners, and lawyers, and drug makers.
just like they do their studies involve 100s and 1000s of people.
but they really want to be able to socalize…
socializing is literally how reserach and any science is done.
nobody is isolated in a room when they do research. they do it with other people.
And so much of it is basically impossible to do with scheduled calls. People have tried making video call software to replicate in-person interaction dynamics, but none of them helped for the labs I worked in.
- When you’re discussing in person, conversations naturally split up into separate conversations each with their own interested participants.
- If you’re no longer interested in something, you can temporarily tune out and listen in on a different nearby conversation to gauge whether you want to move to a different group.
- Video call softwares have introduced breakout rooms, but you need to leave a room to enter another. You can’t just quickly scan the room with your ears and pick out another topic you want to talk about. You also can’t do this scan without signaling to current participants that you might not want to talk to them.
- There was another that created a virtual 2D room where you can walk around and get proximity chat, but things just get too noisy because you don’t get directional audio.
- Calls require scheduling and lack flexibility. Compared to an in person conference where the plan is basically just being around other researchers and interacting with them for the whole day. If it were remote, you would have to book calls to fill up your day and you can’t just decide to drop something because you’re tired and need some time to recover. If you schedule a call, you’re expected to be at the call.
- Scheduled calls come with much higher expectations. You don’t generally go into a call to exchange three minutes of small talk and hang up. You’re expected to know ahead of time that this is someone you want to talk to and what you want to talk about with this person. In person meetings let you go through this small talk process with multiple people to find the ones who share your research interests.
- Body language communicates a lot too, especially in this search process. Get enough experience with this and you have a much higher chance of picking out people who are of a compatible form of neuro-spicy.
- Considering that so many researchers are neurodivergent in some way, planning specific activities helps a lot as social lubricant. Going out for drinks as an evening activity is fairly standard at all conferences I’ve attended. There’s one guy who always organizes morning runs. Sometimes, we chat over board games. Etc.
Passive-aggressive bullshit, brought on by emotional immaturity, and social anxiety.
Fucking children running around in adult bodies.
always baffles me how people would pay 100s per night for a hotel and then act like an extra 10 bucks to park is TOO FAR.
I’m always baffled by how cheap most parking is, outside of private garages for event spaces that are jacked up for suburbanites when they come into the city, that’s the only time it seems expensive to me, and yet they are always full so clearly they aren’t pricing it too high.
Where can I get hotel parking for 10?
I am happy when its only 50. I am seeing 100 at a lot of places now.
One particular hotel I was in recently had no other option, even though they had a car garage that was all by itself, in other words no one else was going to use it.
$85 a day. Stayed a week. No discounts for a weeks stay.
i’ve never paid more than 10-15 for hotel parking. but i’m not getting hotel rooms in dense urban cores as a tourist.
yeah if you are getting a hotel in manhattan or similar, you would expect to pay $50 a day or more. that’s the same as it would be for any day-garage. where i live downtown parking is 75 a day, and that’s still underpriced. you can park at a subway stop for $5 and take the subway into town if you don’t want to pay downtime prices. or ride the commuter rail.
lots of tourists in my city book a room in the 'burbs and commute in, because it’s cheaper. you want a premium experience, you pay premimum prices. downtown hotel rooms in my city are 350-500 a night, and more during peak travel weeks.
More like extra $50.
There’s a beefeater (UK pub/restaurant chain) in my town that recently made their car park pay and display. Their customers have resorted to parking on the grass verges and pavements leading up to the building, causing safety issues (blocking views of turning onto a 50 road, covering pavement and forcing pedestrians into the road; that sort of thing).
I’m sure if the local council started charging them for the damage caused to the green, or even the damage caused by accidents due to their customers choice of parking, the car parking fee would quickly disappear.
Tbh, I’m surprised it hasn’t already. Their car park is always empty now, so it’s not generating revenue, and they used to have double the amount of cars you see round there now… so my guess is people fucked off somewhere else, and this attempt at squeezing just resulted in a permanent loss of regular revenue
Yeah we have tons of empty beachfront parking lots around here too because people don’t want to pay to park. Instead people park their cars up along the local streets. And even if you do pay to park there, the law requires the lot to be empty by 7pm, so nobody wants to fucking park there even if they pay. Beachfront parking lots are a tragic waste of nature space.
Based on all of those “Trivago” commercials I’ve seen I can only conclude that the whole hotel industry is a scam, trying to trick you into giving them more money than what the room is worth.
the room is worth what people are willing to pay for it. if it was too expensive it would be vacant.
That assumes information symmetry.
Good lord, the amount of people who are unwilling to state what their issue is and actually take an action that will change the problem is ridiculous. Nothing suggested in the comments or the post will ever make a connection in the minds of the hotel’s owners or managers. You’ll add to their bottom line, sure, but the hotel going out of business isn’t necessarily a good thing, considering the building will sit there for a few years, be sold to another chain, and reopen. The other hotels in the area are probably charging the same parking fee, or just folding it into their total cost. Maybe since the first hotel closed, they’ll get to tack on more fees with less competition. You’ve accomplished nothing except adding more waste to the junkyard/garbage dump.
Get your ass onto a review site, clearly explain what you’re annoyed with, and state you won’t be going back. Go to another review site, repeat. Repeate. Repeatay. One, it makes the issue clearly visible to other people who might now choose to stay elsewhere, and two, it costs the hotel the same (well, maybe the same) amount of money but now they have an incentive to change whatever it is that annoyed you because of people choosing to stay elsewhere until it’s changed.
I’m a big fan of weaponizing hotel reviews. I review almost every hotel room I stay in, and I’m brutally honest. I say what I like, but I also say what I don’t like. I’m not picky, I only expect a comfortable bed, a clean room, a clean operational bathroom, and an operational TV. If any of those are off, it’s a problem, and it’s going into the review.
It’s surprising how many motels don’t have operational TVs any more. I recently had a run of three motels in a row with non-working TVs.
I expect the bare minimum, that’s all. Fuck up the bare minimum, and I’m going to savage you.
Hotels blame their bad reviews on the employees. Once worked at a hotel that blamed the front desk for the bad reviews the hotel got because of a burst water main.
That ain’t just hotels, my friend. That’s standard executive practice. They teach that in business school. It’s ALWAYS the employees’ fault.
I actually left a good review recently when I had to stay somewhere and only had the laptop. Their IT fellow was super helpful in helping me connect to the internet, despite my inexperience with the linux side of internet connection issues.
I leave good, even great reviews, when warranted. I especially like to call out employees by name, when they’ve done something extra for me. That way, even corporate sees it, in case they have that manger who takes credit for everything.
I prefer to leave good reviews, but a bad review is somewhat satisfying after a bad stay.
I propose a compromise: Parking is free, but there’s a discount if you don’t need car storage space.
how is this different?
Because then the price to stay isn’t falsely advertised.
Reframing is helpful.
this is literally the same thing
Psychologically different, humans are loss averse, being charged for something they feel is normal behavior leads to them acting out. Not winning a discount because it’s not worth it is easier to accept. Same bottom line, different behavior outcomes
Exactly. “Free parking” is a fucking ridiculous concept. It’s just making others pay for it.
Are you unfamiliar with what “reframing” means?
Touché, I see what you mean now.
See? Reframing 😁
Even better, a bit of melted ice cream poured down the air conditioner vents of your polluting rolling hunks of metal will make your car smell like vomit for eternity.
Jesus, I swear some people are incapable of understanding other places.
I would love to take a train to my vacation destination. Not possible in the US at all. An 8 hour drive can become a 16hr bus or train ride that costs double that of driving.
I live in a country now that has good trains and buses. I love it, it’s 100% better.
But I can’t bring myself to be so pissed at someone that wants a family vacation and has to drive due to their country’s failure to implement public transit.
Most people in the world grow up in a country that is fraction of the size of America, and developed in the era of history before cars. If a city developed and grew in the Middle Ages, it is going to be a tightly organized place, so people can get to other parts of the city by walking or horse draw transportation.
But America had most of its development during the car era, and cities adopted a larger sprawl, even creating suburbs, from which people could drive.
Now that we’re built up this way, with lots of suburbs, it’s common for people to live 30-60 minutes, by car, to their workplace. Stores restaurants, schools, etc., are all too far to walk, or even bike, and the route may be dangerous due to traffic. Cars are essential to live a normal life.
There is an effort to upgrade public transportation, but things like trains are always going to be better within the cities. Traveling between cities is just too far, and even current trains aren’t sufficient. It literally takes the same time to drive, and is probably going to be less expensive than a train ticket. If we had maglev bullet trains it would be faster, but the price would also be much higher.
We’ve already developed as a car society, and our geographic size makes trains and busses problematic anyway. We can try to add bullet trains, and a other efforts to relieve traffic, but we will probably always be a car culture in America.
I have to say that’s simply not true.
America is car centric not because it has to be, but because it was lobbied for.
Back in the 1920s we actually had a more robust transit system. Until Ford and the other auto manufacturers pushed for more roads. I know of places growing up that are now 1.5hrs away by car, but they used to have an affordable train that took 1 hour. I don’t remember those trains, but my grandparents did.
And you are right about some points. The density and distance in the US is a challenge. There will never be a bus route near my childhood home. The nearest gas station was 3 miles away and there were not enough people to justify it. But there is no reason why there couldn’t have been a bus near that gas station to take people into town.
Also you are 100% wrong about trains. City to city travel is where they would be the most useful in the US. Trains can travel large distances very effectively if given the proper infrastructure. Amtrak is a joke, but it is not even close to good rail infrastructure. Rail can be so much better and is so much better in many countries. And you may say these countries are smaller than the US, and you’d be right, but they are similar in size to many states. If we had travel that efficient within state it would be a major improvement.
A system of hubs designed to take people into cities and between them would be the ideal solution with the current density.
I want American car culture to die. I hope it does, but I won’t hate people for needing a car because it is necessary in America.
Absolutely valid, although I disagree with:
I want American car culture to die.
But at least you had this qualifier:
I hope it does, but I won’t hate people for needing a car because it is necessary in America.
I don’t mind cars remaining (and even you acknowledge that they are necessary in America), I just want better, faster, cheaper alternatives, so that their use is diminished significantly. When I visit relatives in NYC (often), I love using the trains and busses. My car usually sits unused most of the time I’m there. I would love to use mass transit in my own city if it was decent. About all I use it for is to go to the airport, which has been a terrific convenience. It’s nice to be able to tell someone to drop off or pick me up at the local train station instead of the airport.
Your history is correct, and the auto and oil companies even encouraged and incentivized cities to abandon their electric trolly lines, in favor of gas-swilling, smoke belching internal combustible engines. It’s really a combination of all the factors we both mentioned, and a whole lot more besides.
A big problem is that travel within cities and suburbs is one kind of transportation problem, and traveling between cities is a different kind of problem, and they often require different strategies and solutions that can be in conflict with each other. Regular trains and subways may work in the city, but not maglevs, which are better for long distance travel. So how do we have both, when new railways are hard to create, and the old ones are already crowded?
Add to that the simple fact that the sheer enormity of the country is an immutable variable that makes transportation alternatives necessary, but also very problematic.
I think a national bullet train infrastructure has to be America’s next big improvement, if we could keep the oil companies and their stooges from stopping it.
You talk about there being two problems here, and I agree, but I don’t think those problems are incompatible. They have two different solutions, but that’s to be expected. First thing, very easy: remove all national and state level speed limits on rail. Rail should be allowed to go at maximum safe design speed.
For high speed intraurban transport, we need to give a DOT-Amtrak collaboration instruction and resources, and just have them start building up lines and capacity as a massive infrastructure project.
For metropolitan transport I think that the northeastern corridor’s model (state departments of transportation building and maintaining passenger rail networks that are operated by Amtrak) is probably the best option where available (interstate collaboration would be vital here). Or for a way to handle it without state cooperation, Sound Transit in Seattle is a good model. It’s run by all the counties in the metro area and is building out lines of light rail as mandated by bond measures. Neither of these is a replacement for an urban center rail network (such as a subway or trolly system), but they connect towns, suburbs, districts, neighborhoods, etc. The state wide version just also connects even smaller or out of the way places.
That all sounds great. I’d love to see a high speed rail line up the East coast, the West Coast, and up the Middle, and then routes connected across the South, and another across the North. As long as the ticket price was compatible with airline tix, it would be very successful, even it took a bit longer than flying. If much rather take a high speed train over an airplane. It will still be a lot faster and easier than driving.
Yeah, I’m a proponent of building an NYC-Chicago line and a San Diego to Seattle to start as proof of concept and from there expanding, probably with San Francisco-Chicago and Miami-Maine and then try to build legs that can hit a bunch of cities while connecting them to a major spine like Cleveland to Mobile and city connection lines like the Texas triangle.
It’d be a logistical challenge to figure out where all needs to be connected quickly. Like you’d probably want a southern east west line as well as the northern one. But this is exactly the sort of shit that simulation can help figure out. And worst case scenario, it’s not like you’re going to get that many complaints about a 14 hour (assuming several stops) overnight train ride from nyc to sf
But I can’t bring myself to be so pissed at someone that wants a family vacation and has to drive due to their country’s failure to implement public transit.
you could use that exact same argument to justify a lot of bad things and systemic failures
I can be pissed at the system and not those forced to live in it
God forbid your 2 ton hunk of metal doesn’t get free storage everywhere you go.
There are so many places in the US that are functionally impossible to travel to, without some very expensive and impractical transit.
Hotels charge parking to make extra money. They need you to drive to them for vacation, otherwise they would go out of buisness
the average hotel stay is not for vacation, it’s for work. monday-friday morning is primarily workers, friday-sun morning are usually the vacationers/visitors/etc. resorts and stuff? all vacation all the time. but your local hilton? not so much
Oh I feel that too, traveled for work so much in 1 year I managed to get top rewards for a chain.
The hotels that charged parking were the ones we rarely stayed at and typically were in more touristy areas. The hotel right off the interstate didn’t charge for parking. Honestly most hotels don’t charge parking
While I do agree that cars take up far too much space, charging a guest for parking is a bit of a dick move under most circumstances.
While I do agree that cars take up far too much space, charging a guest for parking is a bit of a dick move under most circumstances.
They always charge for parking, the difference is in whether they just charge the people that actually show up in a two ton tin can, or just charge everybody regardless of how they got there, in which case it’s just worked into the price of the room.
Whether visible on the bill or not, there’s no scenario where the price of the land your hotel sits on doesn’t factor into the price of your stay.
Which to me also leaves zero moral space for retaliatory b.s. like keeping the water running or destorying furniture.
Charging for limited stuff makes sense, otherwise the hotel would need as many parking spots as it has beds
Yeah, charging for hotel parking in NYC, DC, or a dense part of Seattle is an entirely different beast from charging for it in Montana or the outskirts of a national park. The question comes down to if it’s reasonable for you to have gotten there without a car and if it’s reasonable for you to get around where you’re going without one. For places where not having a car with you is unreasonable a parking fee feels like a hidden fee for everyone, where for somewhere you probably flew into and can take public transit around it’s charging for an extra amenity.
That parking lot could have been another freaking hotel instead of car storage, and you’re saying it should be free.
Yep I am.
While I do agree that cars take up far too much space, charging a guest for parking is a bit of a dick move under most circumstances.
It’s really not. Most of the time this is because the local jurisdiction taxes parking in some way, and as is always the case in the US, the local business isn’t going to absorb those fees.
Either pay for parking directly, or pay for it in the cost if the room regardless if you parked or not.
Most hotels would have a good case to charge for parking if we had things like land value taxes.
Sadly people seem to struggle with thinking in terms that aren’t black and white. A position like yours seems to blow their mind.
It still takes up space, that you either have to rent/buy extra as hotel or can’t use for more sensible stuff. If anything, if parking is free, everybody is paying the fee even if you don’t use parking.
Yes. It’s truly infurating how non car owners are forced to subsidize the ever loving shit out pretty much every aspect of car ownership, and then ignorant car brains have the nerve to complain about a small parking fee or gas prices, all while their mode of transportation is pretty much uniquely responsible for unimaginable death, injury, and ecological destruction.
For a hotel in the US, Yes.
???
